Abstract

This paper focuses on a discussion of the five major paradigms currently involved in negotiation research: mechanism, process, system, field, and game. It scans their respective potential to cope with two challenges of negotiation research. The first is to bridge the gap between practitioners and researchers. The second is to clarify the ambiguity, present in most analysis, between those characteristics of a negotiation which stem out of the specifics of the problem being negotiated, and those which pertain generally to the negotiation process itself.

The discussion will show that the game paradigm, although currently less systematically used than the others, has a unique capacity in both these respects. It needs, however, a thorough reexamination, to which much of the paper is dedicated. Our conclusion is that a systematic reflection on, and utilization of, the game paradigm provide a sound basis for a wide range of applications which can be labeled Game Analysis, and are quite useful in negotiation research and other similar fields in which the practitioners' present and past experience is a crucial factor.